Is the Pope Catholic . . . Enough?

By Christopher Noxon

Published: March 9, 2003

The first sign that something unusual was going on up the hill was the appearance of a fleet of brand-new Volkswagen bugs, lined up on a muddy bluff like a row of oversize Easter eggs. It was a local handyman who spotted them while he was out on a walk through this little valley in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles, near Malibu. Neighbors had already been talking about the 16-acre property on the valley's south slope, and soon word spread that a church group called Holy Family had purchased the site with plans to break ground for a 9,300-square-foot Mission-style church complex.

Among the neighbors who wondered about the new arrival was my father, a recently retired documentary filmmaker who joined the local homeowners association when he moved to the area two years ago. This latest project, however, wasn't the usual commercial complex or instant enclave of luxury homes that tended to attract the association's attention. It was a church, that much was clear, but it didn't sound at all like your garden-variety community parish. A representative for the property owner explained that the church was Catholic, but it wasn't affiliated with the Roman Catholic archdiocese. While the church building was relatively large, the congregation was quite small, with about 70 members. And though religious practices and rituals would be familiar to Catholics, there was one big difference: Sunday Mass, it was reported, would be conducted entirely in Latin.

Lest anyone get the impression that this band of spiritual seekers might disperse if the collection baskets were to run dry, a church representative assured the neighbors that the church was supported by an unnamed individual congregant with ''tremendous financial viability.''

Would that explain the VW bugs? The handyman recalls posing the question at an early community meeting. He was told that the congregant financing the church ''had given them as gifts to his nieces and nephews,'' he says. ''I remember thinking, 'That's some generous uncle.'''

The person behind the unusually well-endowed chapel turned out to be the actor Mel Gibson, star of ''Mad Max,'' ''Lethal Weapon'' and ''Braveheart.'' The church is operated by a nonprofit corporation; according to public financial records, Gibson is its director, chief executive officer and sole benefactor, making more than $2.8 million in contributions over the past three years.

The fact that Gibson is building a church in the hills near Los Angeles should come as no huge surprise. Gibson's Catholicism has never been a secret, and in fact gives him a sort of reverse-exoticism in a town where other stars dabble in Buddhism, kabala and Scientology. An avowed family man still on his first marriage, with seven children to show for it, Gibson smokes, raises cattle, publicly shuns plastic surgery and seems wholly unmoved by most of the liberal-left causes favored by industry peers. Recently, however, something beyond the impulse to entertain has been showing up in Gibson's work. Last year he played a former minister who rediscovers religion amid an alien invasion in ''Signs'' and a reverent Catholic lieutenant colonel in the war drama ''We Were Soldiers.'' In these films, but especially in a new movie, a monumentally risky project called ''The Passion,'' which he co-wrote and is currently directing in and around Rome, Gibson appears increasingly driven to express a theology only hinted at in his previous work. That theology is a strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives -- including a seminary dropout and rabble-rousing theologist who also happens to be Mel Gibson's father.

Gibson is the star practitioner of this movement, which is known as Catholic traditionalism. Seeking to maintain the faith as it was understood before the landmark Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, traditionalists view modern reforms as the work of either foolish liberals or hellbent heretics. They generally operate outside the authority or oversight of the official church, often maintaining their own chapels, schools, seminaries and clerical orders. Central to the movement is the Tridentine Mass, the Latin rite that was codified by the Council of Trent in the 16th century and remained in place until the Second Vatican Council deemed that Mass should be held in the popular language of each country. Latin, however, is just the beginning -- traditionalists refrain from eating meat on Fridays, and traditionalist women wear headdresses in church. The movement seeks to revive an orthodoxy uncorrupted by the theological and social changes of the last 300 years or so.

Michael W. Cuneo, a sociology professor at Fordham University who reported on right-wing Catholic dissent in his 1997 book, ''The Smoke of Satan,'' wrote that traditionalists ''would like nothing more than to be transported back to Louis XIV's France or Franco's Spain, where Catholicism enjoyed an unrivaled presidency over cultural life and other religions existed entirely at its beneficence.''